The present invention relates to a braking device for a self-orientating twin castor.
The so-called twin castors that are mounted on pieces of furniture (tables, chairs, chests of drawers, and so forth) are generally constituted by two wheels provided with axial bushes for rotatably mounting them on a supporting spindle. The spindle is driven through a support which is constituted by a vertical wall that lies between the wheels and by a sort of semicylindrical hood that covers the wheels in an upward region.
A cylindrical recess is formed in the wall and has a vertical axis that is eccentric with respect to the spindle and is open upwardly. Said recess acts as a rotation seat for a self-orientation pivot to be inserted and fixed in an appropriate seat of the piece of furniture on which the castor is to be mounted.
Safety rules very often require castors to be self-braking. For this purpose, said castors are provided with devices that keep the wheels in a constantly braked condition until the user deactivates these devices temporarily. These castors have some hardly negligible drawbacks. First of all, in order to provide the support for self-braking castors it is necessary to provide molds that are different from those of castors that do not have a self-braking device. Secondly, the assembly of self-braking castors is relatively complicated and considerably affects the manufacturing cost.